Ladies of the Lake is now available online and through your favorite bookstore.

I’m celebrating with Book Launch Giveaways!  Check out this short Book Gems with Cathy Gohlke video (click on my picture or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmEHFGER2X8&t=1s ) to see how you can enter to win one of FOUR PRIZES:

A signed copy of Ladies of the Lake and an Anne of Green Gables Devotional

A signed copy of Ladies of the Lake and a Little Women Devotional

A signed copy of Ladies of the Lake and a Five-Year Journal

A signed copy of Ladies of the Lake and a reproduction newspaper page from The Great Halifax Explosion and a reproduction newspaper page from the Sinking of Titanic

Or click here to view Book Gems video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmEHFGER2X8

I’m thrilled to bring Ladies of the Lake to you!  This is a story of four girls who grow into women vowing friendship for life—friendship, in all its strength and beauty and fragility.  It’s a story that demonstrates the need to belong, to be understood, loved, and valued for who we are.  It’s a story about our desperate need to give and receive forgiveness, even when we don’t believe we deserve it.  If you grew up loving Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women or Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables and Prince Edward Island—I think you’ll find yourself happily lost in the pages of Ladies of the Lake. 

In my story, four girls from very different backgrounds—Canadian and American—find themselves at Lakeside Ladies Academy, a Connecticut boarding school modeled after Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, Connecticut.  Miss Porter’s School was established for girls in 1843 and has been attended by many notable personalities, including Jacqueline Bouvier (Jackie Kennedy Onassis), Dorothy Walker Bush (mother of President George H. Bush), and her granddaughter, Dorothy Bush Koch.

It was a treat to walk the grounds of Miss Porter’s School, and an even greater treat to imagine the adventures and escapades of my characters.  It is during their years at Lakeside that the four girls realize they are kindred spirits and form their sisterhood, vowing that wherever life takes them, they will always be there for each other.  But that is before:  Before love and jealousy come between Adelaide and Dorothy, the closest of the friends.  Before the dawn of the Great War upends their world and casts baseless suspicion on the German American man they both love.  Before a terrible explosion in Halifax Harbor rips the sisterhood apart.

Seventeen years later, Rosaline Murray receives an unsuspecting telephone call from Dorothy, now headmistress of Lakeside, inviting her to attend the graduation of a new generation of girls, including Rosaline’s beloved daughter.  With that call, Rosaline is drawn into a past she’d determined to put behind her.  To memories of a man she once loved . . . of a sisterhood she abandoned . . . and of the day she stopped being Adelaide MacNeill.

Women need the friendship, mentoring, companionship, and sisterhood of other women.  Relationships between women are beautifully painted in the Bible and in literature.  Such bonds in real life are precious and often prove life-sustaining through hard times.  Who, besides your sister or best friend—your sister of the heart—will tell you the truth, even when it hurts, will rejoice with you over the smallest victory, will stand with you through hard times when all others desert, and is ready to take your phone call even in the dead of night?

Friendships require honesty, trust, nurturing, investments of time and means, even sacrifice.  But as the friends in Ladies of the Lake learn, even the closest of friendships can be sorely tested.  Most fallings-out are not pitted against a backdrop as dramatic as WWI or all that war and its prejudices and divisions present to my characters.  Despite their good intentions, each young woman plays a role in the failure of their friendship pact, and each middle-aged woman plays a needed role in seeking forgiveness, reconciliation, and in taking tangible steps toward renewal.

I love this book, and I hope you will, too.  Once you’ve read Ladies of the Lake, I’d love to know what you think.  If you take a photo with the book, I’d love to see it.  Leaving a book review would help immensely.

God bless, and happy reading,

Cathy